'Outrageous'

A Rick Perry spokesman pushed back on President Obama's use of the Texas wildfires in a fundraising speech last night to criticize the GOP frontrunner as a climate-change critic.

"It's outrageous President Obama would use the burning of 1,500 homes, the worst fires in state history, as a political attack," Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan emailed this morning. "This from a president whose nation is financially suffering and his solution is taking more money away from families by raising taxes on families and small businesses."

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This is a fight that is mutually beneficial to both Obama and Perry - the president's team believes it would rather face the Texas governor than Mitt Romney, and Perry could use a direct, forward-looking fight with the president to move past a rocky week.